In some ways, it's more challenging than building "an Uber", once you get into different cargo and body types, document management, insurance, etc. We launched in Russia first, and not being able to do electronic signatures added a set of challenges.
In any event, glad these investments are happening. Trucking is badly broken, especially in the US.
I'd like to see this supported, particularly the "especially" part, given the extraordinary scale of hauling going on in the US via trucking. The economic facts on the ground in the US overwhelmingly disagree with you.
If it's so broken, and the US economy relies so much on it, how is the US GDP per capita so high? Both can't be true. It's either functioning well, leading to the high reliability and predictable delivery times we see today, assisting the US in having the most powerful economy on earth, or it's badly broken (where is the supporting economic evidence?).
"There are also more trucks operating in Europe than there are in the United States, with 63 trucks per 1,000 people in the EU — compared to only 21 trucks per 1,000 people in the United States." [1]
The USA uses long distance rail freight far more than Europe, where the railways are full (i.e. at capacity) with passenger rail. That's in spite of much stricter controls on driving time.
(I think there's also a fair amount of water transport in Europe. When I moved house from England to Denmark, my belongings were transported on a ship across the North Sea.)
There are several ways trucking could be badly broken but still consistent with your statements:
a) Say today, company X sells a thing for $100, of which $15 covers shipping cost, $15 is profit and $70 is what they paid their middleman for the thing. Suppose further that shipping cost could be reduced to $11 just by properly managing trucking, increasing the profit margin by 27%. These are of course made-up numbers, but just because a business is successful doesn't mean there are no inefficiencies left.
b) It is well known that certain jobs take a huge toll on the people doing these jobs, causing early burnout, physical and/or mental health problems up to and including suicide, etc. E.g. drone pilots, people working with social media illegal content filtering have been covered in the media recently. If trucking causes lots of health issues, it's not just "badly broken" in the human compasdion sense, it also leads directly to reduced national economic output (with a 2x multiplier, you're taking away a taxpayer and adding an additional user of Medicaid/whatever).
I would give another example: the US government subsidizes trucking (especially long distance trucking) to a much greater degree than freight railroads through building and maintaining highways. All things being equal the marginal cost of shipping via freight rail should be lower given its higher fuel efficiency.
See the table on page 22. When you add together extra road maintenance, accidents, particulate & NO emissions, congestion and subtract the taxes and fees you end up with a cost to society of $55 per million ton-mile for trucking and $9 for rail.
I live pretty close to some train tracks, so I observe trains on a regular basis. There are a fair number of coal cars, which I guess is a "low value commodity", but that portion is dwarfed by the overwhelming majority of rail cars that transport intermodal shipping containers. Is everything in a shipping container a low value commodity? Would it really be faster to transport containers by truck, so they would actually only travel 10 out of every 24 hours? You seem to really misunderstand freight shipping.
I owned a trucking company and my family owned a freight brokerage business.
Trucking is a hard lifestyle, especially over the road. The job is physically demanding and there are a lot of ways to do it wrong.
Owner / operators and small trucking companies are, in some cases, like sharecropping. You don't make premium money, that's taken off the top through a series of intermediaries / brokers. You have to buy sub par equipment, because it's cheaper. You can't pay your drivers as well and often times, you do so in cash, which eventually bites you. And to boot, the business is very capital intensive. If your customer pays you in 30 days, and you run coast to coast, it could costs you 1100 gallons a week (3000 per week) and you don't get paid for 5 weeks (15000). Add to that cost of maintenance, insurance (650-800 per month - physical damage, liability and cargo), truck and trailer payment ($2000 per month for something newer, but not new, that you wouldn't mind living in or), you have to eat, your cell phone, oil changes ($150 per 15-25k miles) and the 1.25-1.35 per mile you earn, doesn't go all that far. But don't worry, if you need an advance on your shipments pay, for fuel, someone will give you up to 50-60% of your cash, maybe even a little more, for 1-2% or more of all the money you're due. And if you want to get paid faster than 30 days, you can get paid a day or 2 after you deliver and turn in the paperwork, for another 1-2% of the total amount you are due.
One truck shops or small companies can't service the needs of most shippers, so shippers choose big trucking companies or 3pls to manage their transportation. By the time a little guy touches a Bill of Lading / rate confirmation, the shipment can be double or triple brokered, each hand passing paper taking 10% off the top.
On top of that, there's huge theft. Gangs steal tires, cargo, trucks and drivers sometimes choose to transport drugs along with whatever you're asking them to haul...if you are in the business long enough, the stories are epic.
That's not a supporting premise for something being badly broken. Amazon has found it hard to make money in retail, as have Walmart and Costco (2% to 3% razon-thin net income margins). Most retailers find it extremely difficult to make money. That's not necessarily because the business is badly broken. It means the margins are being competed away, which is tremendous for other parties (consumers for one). Lots of industries / segments have the same problem and always will.
In the case of Amazon those thin margins are mainly due to massive re-investment expenses to grow capacity, not competition. The question is if or when they might be able to reign back the investment without risking losing competitiveness with rivals.
https://cargofone.com/en/
In some ways, it's more challenging than building "an Uber", once you get into different cargo and body types, document management, insurance, etc. We launched in Russia first, and not being able to do electronic signatures added a set of challenges.
In any event, glad these investments are happening. Trucking is badly broken, especially in the US.